Re: i hosting i question

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

VIOS to SAN disk absolutely. Only way to fly.

VIOS on Internal disk though hosting IBM i or frankly anything is still 
on my naughty list. THE number one issue is the lack of knowledge on 
that both from the IBM Hardware group as well as the support center.

We have had multiple times where the customer lost EVERYTHING because 
support directed local CEs to do things they should not have done. In 
addition most IBM i only shops cannot spell VIOS or AIX and as a 
consequence they NEVER update the VIOS partitions or the firmware of the 
devices said partitions own. Thus landmines are buried.

Honestly though if you have many TB of disk why NOT SAN?


        - Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 11/22/2017 10:16 AM, Jim Oberholtzer wrote:
> I might also offer that if you are architecting a new solution and more than
> two hosted partitions are planned, you should really look into using VIOS to
> perform the virtualization.  VIOS offers several advantages to IBM i hosting
> IBM i, chief among them are you're not burning IBM i licensing to perform
> the hosting.  Virtualizing fibre attached tape is a breeze as well.
>
> If you use the vSCSI drives with local storage there are a couple of tuning
> things you need to do in VIOS for I/O blocking etc, but that is all well
> documented.
>
> Geesh, I never thought I would ever post something nice about VIOS but, then
> again, it's true.  We use it quite a bit.
>
>
> --
> Jim Oberholtzer
> Agile Technology Architects
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
> Steinmetz, Paul
> Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 8:55 AM
> To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
> Subject: RE: i hosting i question
>
> +1
> I/O hosting much improved with SSD drives.
> I have a Production SSD LPAR hosting only some I/O to R&D LPAR for some
> improved R&D performance, no issues.
> The R&D LPAR has its own dedicated CPU and memory.
>
> Paul
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jim
> Oberholtzer
> Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:35 AM
> To: 'Midrange Systems Technical Discussion'
> Subject: RE: i hosting i question
>
> There is some truth to that statement, but of course, "it depends".
>
> Usually it's because the host system I/O becomes the bottleneck with large
> partitions.  We have several 7TB and 8TB partitions at customers that are
> hosted, but we have carefully monitored the I/O on the host system and
> ensured that it has plenty of memory and CPU.    Watch disk unit busy
> percentage on the host system.  If that gets too high (>20%) then all the
> virtualized systems suffer.
>
> Remember CPU is needed to manage the virtualization and most folks get too
> skinny on that part.  Don't worry that the percent of CPU is near zero most
> of the time, the virtualization CPU usage does not really show on the
> WRKSYSSTS display.  We use WRYSYSACT to find the virtualization jobs and
> monitor them.
>
>
> --
> Jim Oberholtzer
> Agile Technology Architects
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tom
> Duncan
> Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 4:06 PM
> To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
> Subject: i hosting i question
>
> I just had someone tell me that IBM does not recommend using i hosting i if
> the amount of disk is over 3 or 4 Tbytes for performance reasons. Is anyone
> aware of or even heard of this ?
> --
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